Thank you, Susan Klebold

In thirty years of teaching writing and literature and 55 years of editing writing, I have been asked what I think are the most significant works I have encountered.    It is hard for me to list "favorite" authors because I appreciate the accomplishments of so many writers, including some whose works I don't particularly like but who have command of their art in ways that require that attention be paid to them.  But some of the most affecting and significant works that come to mind were written by non-professional writers and student writers.

One such example was in the take-home part of a final examination for the early American literature course, which covers little fiction and poetry and much in the way of letters exchanged between people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and critical essays such as The Federalist Papers, speeches, and many personal journals and accounts.  In recent decades, "literature" has come to mean fiction, poetry, and drama. Those other genres are not considered literature.  But they are, and they are essential to any understanding of what comprises good literature and how it operates within a culture.  The question on the examination asked students to choose a work covered in the course and explain how it illuminated their understanding of the history and circumstances in which the work was produced. 

The essay that still has a hold on my mind came from a young woman from a South Dakota reservation.  She wrote about Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity by American Indians during which her five-year-old daughter died in her arms from injuries the child received from the attack on the household.     The student noted the racial attitudes and bigotry expressed in the account but she also could feel the desolation and hopelessness that Rowlandson experienced, and she admired Rowlandson's strength in faith.  And she noted that readers tended to express great sympathy for Rowlandson but could muster little understanding of why the Indians attacked the settlement where Rowlandson lived and why they took her captive.  The part that the young woman found most moving and informing was the account of Rowlandson carrying the wounded child from place to place as the Indians moved  to avoid pursuers.  The Rowlandson child dies and is buried in the wilderness, and the student found a point of conciliation in the death of the child.  This young South Dakota woman recalled sitting in a desolate shack on the reservation holding her baby sister while the infant died from a severe respiratory infection.  She noted that what she and Rowlandson shared was a lack of sympathy or comfort in their great distress and grief.  The captivity narrative did not provide any consolation or comfort for the student, but it did demonstrate to her that she needed to look for such things in her own culture.  And to do so with greater appreciation and discernment was why she was attending college.

What the young woman did that she had in common with great writers was to take the reader on her quest for understanding and finding the resources of spirit that can sustain one.  She was drawn out of herself by Rowlandson's account and found that she could look at the situation surrounding the death of her infant sister as a hard reality to be confronted, not as an occasion for sympathy.  Her conclusion was that there are people who do not wish others well and one has to build life around those who do.

The image of that young woman in a reservation cabin holding a dying infant is one that is always present with me.  It was a literary gift.

When people write of great, anguishing human tragedies with honesty and perception and tell of their own quests to reach points of understanding,  we have the stuff of true literature, whether fiction, poetry, drama, or prose accounts.  The shootings at Columbine ten years ago have produced such attempts.  The most comprehensive and literarily rendered is Dave Cullen's Columbine which was published last spring.  Cullen blew away myths about the Columbine incident and the two shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.  Cullen covered the Columbine incident from the day it occurred and searched out and analyzed information relentlessly.  In checking and verifying the facts, he performed a great journalistic service for those who care about knowing the true facts and realities and think they are the basis for any progress humanity makes.

During the past week, another dimension was added to the literature about Columbine that complements Dave Cullen's.  Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, has written an essay providing a response to what it is to be the parent of a troubled child who is driven to such violence.  Her essay appears in the November issue of Oprah Winfrey's magazine. In a time, when a large part of the nation is consumed by carping against other  people and fabricating blame to place on them for the nation's ills, Susan Klebold has written an account of the Klebold family that offers a truthful and unsettling account of Klebold family life.  I am sure that it will be maligned by the malice-minded, but for those who earnestly want to solve problems, the essay provides a basis for new understanding.

What is unsettling about the account is that Susan Klebold had no inkling of Dylan's mental state.  It took her ten years, but she came to recognize the fact that when Dylan left the house that April morning, he did not intend to ever return.  He intended to take lives and commit suicide.

The conventional notion promoted by people singularly unqualified to offer advice is that when young people are troubled, they telegraph their troubled state.  Good parents, the notion contends, will spot the signals and intervene.

As a parent and professor,  I know that is not true.  Young people are very good at masking and hiding their troubled states from those they are close to.  They do not want to burden those they love and regard with problems.  A highly respected high school counselor told me some years ago that the most unpleasant part of his job was to inform parents of problems with their children that the parents did not know about.

While the media like to take up the issue of peer pressure,  it is banalized and reduced to simple-minded and absurd axioms.  The impulse in young people as they enter their high school years is to reject parental influence.  It has always been so.  But during the latter decades of the 20th century, adolescents became recognized as a market.  All-pervasive marketing messages are directed toward them.  This occurred simultaneously with the conferring of autonomy on adolescents that severely limited parental influence and discipline.  They were given the power and the means to reform society on their terms.  My high school counselor friend called it "The Lord of the Flies" syndrome.  The most pronounced symptom of this syndrome is juvenile gangs.

The counselor says that kids cannot think past lunch, but they are empowered to make and enforce value decisions.  Those decisions often evolve around cliques and factions, and kids see these cliques and factions as the controlling factors in their destiny, not their families.  In fact, families are rendered powerless to counteract the social predations in teenage society.

All the high school and college shooters have a sense of alienation and oppression in common.  The psychic disturbances that most adolescents experience drive some into depressive trauma.   It is built into the culture and the time.

Susan Klebold, like my student writer from the reservation, had to come to terms with something she had not suspected:

"From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart. I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind."

And:

"For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the horror and anguish Dylan caused. I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son's schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives. Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family, and about love."

Progress is made only from the confrontation with harsh and unpleasant facts.  Thank you, Susan Klebold, for guiding us to such a confrontation.  You have given people of good will and good purpose and intelligence something to work with. It will be noted and not forgotten.  
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Susan Klebold and Dylan on his fifth birthday.